Cognitive Development and Education Flashcards
What did Piaget propose about development and education in children?
Proposed children are genetically programmed with a basic mental structure upon which all knowledge and abilities are built on.
How does Piaget describe childrens learning?
Piaget describes children’s learning about the world as being based upon the creation and development of schemata.
A ‘schema’ is a mental unit of knowledge about a particular aspect of the world.
Assimilation: using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation.
Accommodation: this happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.
What affects did Piaget theories have on education?
Piaget also influenced government policy.
An example of his is the UK government review primary education, which lead to the publication of the Plowden Report in 1967.
The report emphasised individuals learning through play and discovery.
What did Vygotsky propose about development and education in children?
Vygotsky believed that culture and social factors play a part in learning, an aspect Piaget did not consider.
What is the Zone of Proximal Development?
His concept that relates to the difference between what a child can achieve independently and what a child can achieve with guidance and encouragement from a skilled partner.
MKO (the more knowledgeable other): a concepts used to describe an individual who works alongside the learner to demonstrate ideas, strategies or behaviours that the learner can observe and internalise.
What did Anderson et al find?
Found that after engaging in group discussion of text, students showed substantial improvements in critical thinking and reasoning. This is known as scaffolding.
What was the aim of Wood et al. (1976)?
To investigate if children responded to ‘tutoring’ when they had a problem to solve, and to look at how this changed with different age groups.
Outline the research method is Wood et al
Controlled observation / artificial environment.
Event sampling.
Participants were observed as they completed a building task.
Outline the sample used in Wood et al
Volunteer sample, 30 children from the same region of USA.
group included boys and girls and an equal number of 3,4, and 5 year olds.
Outline the procedure
The child had five minutes to play with them without instruction.
A tutor would then, using as many standardised instructions as she could, show the child how to put a pair of blocks together.
Let child construct.
The tutor would try to let the child do it on their own, only giving them demonstrations when needed.
What was the roles of the tutor for the different age groups?
3 year olds: attracting them to the task through demonstration and -providing tempting material
4 year old: a verbal prodder and corrector
5 year old: a confirmer and checker
What are the components of scaffolding?
Recruitment.
Direction maintenance
Frustration control
Demonstration
What were the main conclusions?
Increasing age meant a greater likelihood of task success.
Although younger children might not be able to complete tasks as well as older children, they often equally are able to recognise when a task has been correctly achieved.
The level and type of support needed by children differed across age groups.
What is a cognitive strategy to improve revision or learning?
Mnemonic
A mnemonic can be defined as a technique for aiding the memory, typically when there is a large amount of information to learn, that is unfamiliar to the individual.
Mnemonics can be visual or auditory.
Roediger (1980)
Participants who were instructed to use mnemonic devices performed better on a recall test then the control group who were led to used their own technique.
However, mnemonics can be quite difficult to implement in some forms of information.
